03.28.06

Armstrong’s New Book

Posted in History, The Axial Age, The Eonic Effect at 9:54 pm by nemo

Karen Armstrong’s new book, The Great Transformation, came out today and I have been reading it at high speed. First impressions: what a hopeless mess, just as I feared and predicted on the basis of her other book this year, The History of Myth. In fact, the latter book is somewhat clearer on Armstrong’s views, if not agenda, since it addresses the question of modernity a little more openly. I do not see anything about a ’second Axial Age’ in The Great Transformation. Armstrong has come to recognize the ‘Great Western Transformation’ too, but then she apparently can’t figure out how to square this with her ’second Axial Age’, which the many New Age movements are hoping to bring about in some postmodern reaction to modernity.

Armstrong’s views seem to have shifted, and, apparently, she has drifted into a kind of ’soft Buddhist’ cliche syndrome. The ‘Axial ethos’ is all about compassion, etc…
That’s the first gross misconception: there is no ‘Axial ethos’. The Axial Age shows parallel emergence of quite different things that can’t be collated. In fact, it is a play of opposites. Buddhism and monotheism, for example. And she simply fumbles the ball completely on the Greeks, trying to fit them into her prejudicial logos/mythos distinction on the side of logos. That’s nonsense. The Greek Axial period shows a stupendous variety of things, and the last great flowering of polytheism could just as well be claimed here. The emergence of the ‘logos’ theme in such figures as Heraclitus deserves something better than a swipe at ‘Greek rationalism’. What a bad piece of work.
Then there is the hopeless confusion of dynamics and content. The existence of the Axial interval, as Jaspers defined it, and as I slightly redefined it in my eonic model, is itself the question, and this question transcends the content. Thus Armstrong falls into confusion because Zarathustra is not in the short Axial interval, nor is Christianity or Islam. To include these she is unsure what to do, sometimes suggesting an expansion of the Axial period, making nonsense of the whole question. The simpler explanation is that the issue of the Axial period has no intrinsic connection to monotheism. That should be obvious if you see so many contradictions in parallel.
The solution is to see that the ‘transformation’ is something quite abstract, beyond the issue of particular religions.
Most of all, as in the eonic model,we need to see the phenomenon in a greater context, that of the whole history/evolution of civilization.
There are so many misconceptions in Armstrong’s book I barely know where to begin and feel a bit annoyed that someone with considerable market share will so damage the important data of the Axial Age. Frankly, it’s possible noone will take her seriously, such is the wishywashy character of her interpretations.

Also, I must strongly criticize current historiography/social science, and the mindset of scientism, Darwinism, and the rest. These fields are incapable of dealing with the obvious paradox/enigma of the Axial Age. It has been banished from discussion. And yet this data, interpreted rightly, is immensely important for our understanding of history. The more’s the pity Armstrong will, without interference, mess up the whole question, with no serious review or commentary likely from the scientific/historiographical sources.

I will be commenting further on Armstrong’s book, although the sheer scope of the problems with this book makes a critique a huge task.

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